arts Article Roberto Lugo: Critical Discussions of Hip-Hop, Ceramics, and Visual Culture Heather Kaplan Department of Art, The University of Texas at El Paso, El Paso, TX 79968, USA; [email protected] Received: 30 September 2018; Accepted: 6 December 2018; Published: 10 December 2018 Abstract: This paper looks at the creative work of “ghetto potter” Roberto Lugo. Through the examination of his various forms of art-making, various discussions regarding the intersections of ceramics, hip-hop, and visual culture are explored. Through these intersections, issues related to access and equity are explored. This paper explores topics and issues important to visual culture and art education. Keywords: hip-hop; ceramics; visual culture; Roberto Lugo; identity politics; porcelain 1. Introduction This paper looks to the work of contemporary ceramic artist Roberto Lugo as a way to understand and theorize on the connection between hip-hop and visual arts and visual culture. Lugo, an artist of many forms, including graffiti art, spoken word poetry, or rap, and the form for which he has received the most acclaim, contemporary pottery, is the embodiment or practice of hip-hop’s intersection with the visual. This paper explores how his practices are situated within the vernacular of hip-hop, how the work he creates functions similarly to the politics of rap and hip-hop in that it creates a space for identities and narratives that counter white cultural hegemony, and how his work can be used to unpack the way that form and ideas intersect in order to explore the connections between meaning, message, and material in art education. Lugo’s work has created a forum for black social consciousness and called into question practices and privileges inherent and specific to the field of ceramics. Because of this, his work speaks to larger visual culture and social justice concerns of representation, visuality, and power, laid bare through reimagining and reclaiming (cultural) space. Lugo does this through a “hip-hop aesthetic”, meaning both cultural productions and civic, political, and artistic practices that originate from and contribute to contemporary notions of urban black culture and politics. More specifically, Lugo’s hip-hop aesthetic speaks to black consciousness raising, questioning white visual hegemony, visuality, and visual culture. Roberto Lugo explains that his practice encompasses a variety of methods, including being a “potter, activist, culture-maker, rapper, poet, and educator;” (Lugo, personal communication July 2018), yet his rising star is specifically in the ceramics world. This very year, 2018, Ceramics Art Network, Ceramics Monthly, and Pottery Making Illustrated all named him the ceramic artist of the year. In 2015, Lugo was named a National Council for Education in the Ceramic Arts (NCECA) Emerging Artist of the Year. So, while Lugo’s work takes many forms, it seems that the world of ceramics is claiming much of his work as their own. For many in the ceramics field, this is seen as a windfall, especially for a field that has been criticized for its white monoculture and the hierarchy that it historically placed on white porcelain from Europe and Asia. 2. How Roberto Lugo’s Pottery Questions the Practice of Privileging White Bodies Historically, great value has been placed on porcelain ceramics. This is largely due not only to the material’s qualities (being both highly refined and able to create thin, delicate wares that are also Arts 2018, 7, 102; doi:10.3390/arts7040102 www.mdpi.com/journal/arts Arts 2018, 7, 102 2 of 18 resiliently strong) but also because of its initial scarcity (De Waal 2016). Porcelain originated from Jingdezhen, China and was initially only available through trade with the East. From the 13th century until the beginning of the 18th century, porcelain was an expensive import that was not producible in Europe. Even after it was able to be manufactured in Germany and England, porcelain remained “for the refined, for the ruling class, with all of its power and privilege” (La Force 2015). In ceramics, metaphors of clay bodies and the body prevail, and it is no mistake that porcelaneous and white bodies are often fetishized for their elite refinement produced not only by their comparatively smaller and finer particle size but for their relationship to white bodies, culture, and general qualities of whiteness. Where whiteness refers not only to a sense of purity, cleanliness, and sterility, it also refers to a cultural structure of power and privilege often invisible and described by a lack rather than as a set of visible characteristics (Lopez 2005). In the field of ceramics, whiteness implies a lack of voices from people from diverse and different cultural heritage; typically, ceramics draws its historical roots from Asia and Europe (rather than from indigenous people of the Americas, Africa, or Oceania) (Gupta Wiggers 2013) and practitioners are, more often than not, of European or Asian heritage. As the son of Puerto Rican immigrants, Lugo grew up “in a poverty blighted neighborhood of Philadelphia” (Brown 2017, p. 54). He proudly declares that his lineage has African roots (Brown 2017, p. 56) and that he identifies as and with people of color. While many may see the inclusion of underrepresented minorities like Lugo in the pottery tradition as progress, what is all the more exciting is that the work, which is about the clash of two disparate cultures, has been widely embraced by the field. Lugo is not a minority artist in name only; his work speaks to forms and ideas that wrestle between minority and mainstream culture, low and high culture, popular and niche markets, contemporary urbanity and historical gentility, blackness and whiteness, and hip-hop and pottery. Lugo creates works that often employ familiar European and Asian pottery forms like the urn, teapot, and tea bowl that are ornately decorated, often using gold luster and china paint. The works involve the layering of ornamental pattern like those found in other craft and industrialized art forms, including fabrics and printed wallpapers, and are employed in a style similar to Vienna Secessionist Gustav Klimt. These patterns fill the entire form, save for the spaces that Lugo leaves for equally detailed rendered portraits of persons of historical, political, cultural, or social import. Often, Lugo juxtaposes two like or unlike figures to coax the viewer into understandings precipitated through their connections and comparisons. For instance, the work The Expulsion of Colin Kaepernick and John Brown, 2017 (Figures1 and2) has China painted images of both the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback, and now free agent Colin Kaepernick and the American abolitionist John Brown. Lugo places the portraits of Kaepernick and Brown on opposite sides of the same porcelain urn as if two sides of the same coin. This helps the viewer to make connections between the revolutionary actions of John Brown, who led a raid on the arsenal at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia on 16 October 1859 in the hopes of arming slaves and starting a slave rebellion (Bisson 2009), and the contemporary and controversial actions of Colin Kaepernick, who took a knee during the National Anthem in order to rally others, ignite conversation, and bring further attention to the Black Lives Matter movement (Gregory 2017), a movement that questions white power structures and latent cultural beliefs that ultimately lead to the death and brutalization of African Americans at the hands of law enforcement. Arts 2018, 7, x FOR PEER REVIEW 3 of 18 Arts 2018, 7, 102 3 of 18 Figure 1. The Expulsion of of Colin Colin Kaep Kaepernickernick and and John John Brown, Brown, 2017 2017, ,Porcelain, Porcelain, china china paint, paint, luster, luster, 47 47 ×× 2424 × ×24 24in. in.Image Image by byKeneK KeneK Photography, Photography, courtesy courtesy of ofWexler Wexler Gallery. Gallery. Figure 2. The Expulsion of of Colin Colin Kaep Kaepernickernick and and John John Brown, Brown, 2017 2017, ,Porcelain, Porcelain, china china paint, paint, luster, luster, 47 47 ×× 2424 × ×24 24in. in.Image Image by byKeneK KeneK Photography, Photography, courtesy courtesy of ofWexler Wexler Gallery. Gallery. In western art history and institutions, ceramics ceramics is is a a smaller smaller field field than than other other “fine “fine art” art” fields, fields, like painting painting and and sculpture. sculpture. 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